Further Reading

Every element of Aaron Swartz’s brief, remarkable life exemplifies the stuff we cover all the time on Ars. His tech-filled upbringing, his teenage rise to geek royalty, his hand in reddit’s genesis, and his online political activism made him a worthy subject of Ars conversation well before he became a household name.

Sadly, Swartz’s story didn’t reach critical mass until he took his own life nearly two years after being indicted by a federal court on twelve felony charges. The case hinged on allegations that he had downloaded 4.8 million documents from JSTOR, an online academic research archive, which he accessed from within MIT’s campus without permission.

In the weeks after his suicide, the Internet saw both a massive outpouring of grief and a comprehensive examination of what made his case so outrageous. The latter makes the new feature-length documentary about his life, The Internet’s Own Boy, less than indispensable in telling Swartz’s story, but considering the fact that he spent his final years trying to make information free and open, that’s fitting.

Where the public record falters—and where this film picks up the slack—is in making sense of Swartz’s personality. Director Brian Knappenberger can’t completely overcome the bias inherent in honoring Swartz’s memory, but he still mostly finds the right balance when recounting the coder’s life history and the rapidly changing world of technology around him. The result connects the dots between a young genius and a burdened overachiever facing decades in prison and a lifelong mark of “felon.”

The story of an “alpha nerd”

Further Reading

After briefly summarizing Swartz’s federal court case and subsequent death, The Internet’s Own Boy quickly changes tone by presenting a squeaky-voiced toddler in a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles shirt reading books and playing with his two younger brothers. Between home video clips, family members tell stories of his early brilliance—reading grown-up sentences by the time he was three years old, using computers before that, creating a poor man’s version of Wikipedia in 2000 when he was only 12.

Swartz once told his younger siblings, “There was always something programming could solve,” and the documentary latches onto that as a thesis statement. He was a vocal member of the early RSS development community as only a teenager, and he helped build the guts of Creative Commons before attending Stanford, the school he dropped out of so he could focus on giant Internet projects like reddit and Demand Progress. He was no minor contributor to such efforts, and he racked up a great many fans before turning 18; such luminaries, who appear in the film to speak on Swartz's behalf, include Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, and others.

Viewers who aren’t well versed in acronyms like RSS, PACER, and JSTOR can look forward to clear, brief summaries of the work that Swartz obsessed over, all presented with snappy isometric diagrams. The technical stuff doesn’t get in the way of understanding Swartz’s total personality, but Knappenberger occasionally overdoes the explanations, as if to avoid having to reveal the coder’s most disagreeable traits.

Cory Doctorow calls him “combative but smart,” and Swartz is described in other scenes as a picky eater, an “alpha nerd,” and “a strong personality that ruffled feathers at times.” Enough backhanded compliments accumulate over the film’s runtime that viewers may wonder how much the film softened its treatment of Swartz, but it also presents Swartz’s various higher-level and mission statements about doing good, freeing information, and “making the world a better place.”

These moments punctuate the stories of his later-life initiatives, which accelerated after he left reddit, a company he co-founded. After seeing the federal court database PACER lock citizens out of public information via paywall, Swartz coordinated the legal, free accumulation of its database. On the heels of that success, he set his sights on JSTOR, the giant scientific journal database that houses a mix of publicly and privately funded research behind its own semi-opaque paywall.

Swartz exploited that weird not-quite-paywall by logging into JSTOR from MIT’s libraries under fake accounts to download its giant database of journals and papers. When his heavy activity was noticed and subsequently blocked, Swartz allegedly responded by waltzing into MIT’s basement and attaching a computer directly to the university’s network to resume his downloads.

The Internet’s Own Boy focuses heavily on the MIT story that led to his arrest and years of back-and-forth with the federal government, and savvier documentary viewers won’t learn too much new information. Other than a few stark scenes, particularly the security camera footage of Swartz in MIT’s basement, the film recounts details that had already been laid bare, including federal prosecutors’ disproportionate aggression and JSTOR withdrawing its initial request for prosecution.

Fighting bias with bias?

Further Reading

Remembering the talented activist who lived in our Internet neighborhood.

Where the film could have shone is in telling the story from all sides, but its cast of confidants and colleagues rarely sways to any side other than Swartz’s. In particular, the film's talking heads almost unanimously agree that the current copyright system is “antiquated,” and they make few comments about content protection, let alone new ways for creatives and coders to make money on a share-crazy Internet. (The closest the film comes is in explaining Swartz’s work on Creative Commons, which the film later describes as an imperfect system.)

That’s a hard complaint to swallow, since much of Swartz’s downfall comes from his singular view about copyright, and the trouble he eventually faced is met in the film with mostly blind rage and utter disagreement. At no point are his criminal actions at MIT described as “civil disobedience,” for example; instead, Swartz’s actions are compared to the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who broke and bent laws in their early careers.

Only incredibly late in the film do we get any sense of the other side of the argument. “What drove the prosecution was the sense that Swartz was dedicated not only to breaking the law but nullifying it,” former federal prosecutor and George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr says. “Giving access to the data in a way where the toothpaste couldn’t be put back into the tube. Then Swartz’s side would win.”

The film could have been that much more powerful if it had explored how Swartz grew up too fast to appreciate the “at any cost” part of his willful lawbreaking, of uncapping that toothpaste tube. To Knappenberger’s credit, the film takes an opportunity to focus its anger on the wider-spread problems of American over-prosecuting: “Anything we’re afraid of, like the future of the Internet and access, and anything we’re angry about, creates a criminal justice intervention,” said Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Rights Initiative, “but usually, the people targeted and victimized by incarceration responses are poor and minority.”

Perhaps the filmmakers felt that Swartz’s case was lopsided enough against his favor; why not a film that tells the story from the other extreme? Indeed, its most powerful moments don’t suffer a bit in spite of bias, particularly a scene in which Swartz’s ex-girlfriend (and Wired freelance contributor) Quinn Norton admitted to sharing potentially damaging information with federal prosecutors.

“In that moment, I regret that I said what I did,” Norton said. “But my much larger regret is that we have settled for this—that we are okay with a justice system that tries to game people into little traps so that we can ruin their lives.”

The film closes by embracing the same attitude Swartz had in public life in his final days: making calls for action and championing grassroots efforts to promote the freedom of information (along with any legislators united in those efforts). Those stories of active, engaged masses versus a confused old guard, told clearly and quickly with a lot of context and very little obnoxious hand-holding, rise above the film’s missteps, ultimately making this one of the best tech-obsessed documentaries in recent memory. Even better, the film closes with a slew of very interesting Swartz interviews about American Internet policy, from the SOPA debate and beyond, and their takeaways are still relevant today.

He may have been an obnoxious collaborator and a picky eater, but between his efforts and films like this, Swartz will not soon be forgotten.

190 Reader Comments

He was barely 24 when he commited the act - he was only just a couple months into 27 when he died. Current laws seriously need to be adapted to the fact that the impulse control part our brains don't fully develop until about age 25 (I'd go age 30 just to be safe -- everyone develops differently).

If Swartz was as feeble minded as you seems to claim, then why didn't his family petition for guardianship/conservatorship to protect him from himself? The justice system may need to take those things into account. But under our adversarial legal system, it's his defense teams' job to argue for "diminished capacity defense" at trial or sentencing, not the prosecutors.

They offered him months but made it clear if he decided to fight it he could have been looking at many years in prison. They extorted him with years of life looking to make a name for themselves, pathetic. The whole thing is a damn shame.

Although I agree that the prosecution in this case was, frankly, insane and ridiculous... at the same time, I disagree with Aaron's positions and the fact that he wouldn't even dare think about compromise.

I've written articles for publication, some of which I was paid for. I spend a considerable amount of money on my education, and training, for the sole purpose of writing and getting paid to be a researcher. If everything is free, how do I pay my bills?

How does JSTOR pay for their servers so I can get access to things when I'm writing a literature review? How do they pay their accountants? Secretaries?

I own a small publishing company as a hobby. Most of the money made goes to the authors and editors. I keep maybe 20% of what is earned. Yet people still pirate our books. We keep our ebook prices very low - we have prices that are 1.99, 2.99, and some at 5.99 (for VERY large books - and we've lowered those, or offered frequent discounts). Apparently our books should be "free" because hey - why should our authors get paid for their time?

The minute someone can explain to me, rationally, how I should pay my bills (or write me a check to pay off my student loans) I'll be happy to support Aaron's position. Until then, I agree the prosecuting attorney should be punished - but Aaron deserved punishment as well.

*Somebody* must pay for the hosting of the public domain works. If Swartz was willing to foot the bill, then the question of JSTOR paying for their servers is unimportant as they are not needed. If Swartz could not foot the bill, then JSTOR would simply continue charging and people would continue to pay. If the works were released onto a torrent network, then the hosting could be distributed solving the hosting cost problem completely.

Your issue with authors getting paid is not at all related to this discussion because the research papers were/are already public domain and JSTOR was/is the only one making money.

Aaron Swartz was barely an adult, and had his own fears (some true, some imagined). The prosecution tried really hard to get the highest punishment it could.Aaron was already (justifiably) paranoid and on the verge of breaking and he simply cracked.The fact that he committed suicide, as opposed to seeking extra help is regrettable. I believe he would have won the case eventually, while also bringing in some reform to the system, but alas, that's no longer possible.

Anyone who calls this civil disobedience is clueless, and every time someone says it MLK rolls over in his grave. Civil disobedience is about knowingly committing a crime to further a civil cause and being willing to accept the consequences to further that cause. Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks and MLK practiced civil disobedience, Aaron Schwartz did not.

Back in the days of MLK, Rosa Parks, etc. the worst you'd get would be a few months to a few years in prison (where you'd have to look out for yourself) and maybe a couple of beat downs from the local fuzz. Nowadays depending on how many "Big Corp. Inc." and 3 letter agencies are offended by your actions punishment CAN (and often does) range from solitary confinement to outright waterboarding and prison beatings.

Aaron Swartz was 27 years old. If that's not adult enough, then God help this country.

And how many times does it need to be stated that he rejected a plea deal where he would only spend six months in prison? If his attorney was so concerned about Swartz' well-being he should've advised him to agree to it and avoid the pre-trial jitters that led to his suicide.

He was barely 24 when he commited the act - he was only just a couple months into 27 when he died. Current laws seriously need to be adapted to the fact that the impulse control part our brains don't fully develop until about age 25 (I'd go age 30 just to be safe -- everyone develops differently).

What so many seem to confuse is the AMOUNT of time he would be punished. He might have only been in jail physically for 6 months, but I highly doubt that's what he was concerned with - rather the REST OF HIS LIFE branded as a FELON. This is just barely a step above being branded as a "sex offender," and we all know how ridiculously loose the application of that label is.

At 24, one is old enough to drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, vote, go to war, drive, etc. If at 24 people aren't old enough to be held responsible for their actions because they dinner know right from wrong and can't control themselves, then God help this country.

Another deliberately obtuse one (wouldn't surprise me if one and the same). Amusingly your thinking is starting to look VERY much like Aaron's: True of False, Black or White with no grey in between.

Yes, he needs to be held accountable for what he did, but the punishment needs to take into account the impulsiveness of youth and not wreck the rest of his life due to it. I said that already, but you're deliberately ignoring that fact just so you can be all sanctimonious about it. Another troll.

I'm ignoring that silly argument because somebody like Swartz who is intimately knowledgeable about computers, programming, and the internet would know that what he was doing is illegal and could land him in jail for quite a long time. I'm ignoring that silly argument because he was already on the feds' radar before for what he did to the PACER database. I'm ignoring that silly argument because his actions in the wake of his PACER investigation show his blatant disregard for the law, and his manifesto reinforces it.

Anybody who can do all of these things show that this wasn't the actions of an impulsive young person. These are the actions of a person who does not care for the rule of law, and no amount of wrist slapping was going to deter him otherwise.

Consequences, that's what people in the real world have to deal with. He's no different.

And how many times does it need to be stated that he rejected a plea deal where he would only spend six months in prison? If his attorney was so concerned about Swartz' well-being he should've advised him to agree to it and avoid the pre-trial jitters that led to his suicide.

Said plea deal would amount to him confessing to a felony, which has lifetime consequences in the US (and absolutely no other democratic country, btw). Since it would take an insanely tortured reading of the law to make what he did a felony, it was quote reasonable to reject the deal.

The prosecution then charged him with crimes that would give 30 years in jail if convicted. That is bullying, and arguably prosecutorial misconduct. This doesn't make what Swartz did OK, but two wrongs don't make a right.

Being labeled a felon.... In the real world that's what we call the consequences of your actions. Such consequences are usually a deterrent against people who think they can do anything they want because they're special.

I realize that you're responding a lot in this thread, but do you read the posts you respond to? What he did was not against the statute they wanted him to confess to, by any reasonable reading of the text.

Another deliberately obtuse one (wouldn't surprise me if one and the same). Amusingly your thinking is starting to look VERY much like Aaron's: True of False, Black or White with no grey in between.

Yes, he needs to be held accountable for what he did, but the punishment needs to take into account the impulsiveness of youth and not wreck the rest of his life due to it. I said that already, but you're deliberately ignoring that fact just so you can be all sanctimonious about it. Another troll.

I'm ignoring that silly argument because somebody like Swartz who is intimately knowledgeable about computers, programming, and the internet would know that what he was doing is illegal and could land him in jail for quite a long time. I'm ignoring that silly argument because he was already on the feds' radar before for what he did to the PACER database. I'm ignoring that silly argument because his actions in the wake of his PACER investigation show his blatant disregard for the law, and his manifesto reinforces it.

Anybody who can do all of these things show that this wasn't the actions of an impulsive young person. These are the actions of a person who does not care for the rule of law, and no amount of wrist slapping was going to deter him otherwise.

Consequences, that's what people in the real world have to deal with. He's no different.

Actually, to an extent I agree with you. He certainly went about it the wrong way and deserved to be punished for it. My problem (and I suspect his) with it was the "felon" label being applied for the rest of his life. What he did was in much more (misguided) civil disobedience than criminal in nature, and THAT is the center of all the disagreement as far as I can tell. If he had been given a misdemeanor instead of a felony rap sheet, then I'd have absolutely no problem with that. Instead they wanted to lump him in with drug dealers, thieves, and murderers by applying that "felony" label. THAT is where they went waayyy overboard.

We've all been young and stupid -- some more than others, I'll grant you, but the fact remains most of us have done impulsive things we later regretted. I'm merely of the opinion that sentencing guidelines need to be re-written to take this fact of human nature into account.

And how many times does it need to be stated that he rejected a plea deal where he would only spend six months in prison? If his attorney was so concerned about Swartz' well-being he should've advised him to agree to it and avoid the pre-trial jitters that led to his suicide.

Said plea deal would amount to him confessing to a felony, which has lifetime consequences in the US (and absolutely no other democratic country, btw). Since it would take an insanely tortured reading of the law to make what he did a felony, it was quote reasonable to reject the deal.

The prosecution then charged him with crimes that would give 30 years in jail if convicted. That is bullying, and arguably prosecutorial misconduct. This doesn't make what Swartz did OK, but two wrongs don't make a right.

Being labeled a felon.... In the real world that's what we call the consequences of your actions. Such consequences are usually a deterrent against people who think they can do anything they want because they're special.

I realize that you're responding a lot in this thread, but do you read the posts you respond to? What he did was not against the statute they wanted him to confess to, by any reasonable reading of the text.

If what he did was not against the statutes, then taking it to court would lead to an acquittal and no jail time. You can cry all you want about how the system is rigged, but if somebody like Casey Anthony can be acquitted when the entire nation thought she was guilty, then he had more than a fighting chance.

Another deliberately obtuse one (wouldn't surprise me if one and the same). Amusingly your thinking is starting to look VERY much like Aaron's: True of False, Black or White with no grey in between.

Yes, he needs to be held accountable for what he did, but the punishment needs to take into account the impulsiveness of youth and not wreck the rest of his life due to it. I said that already, but you're deliberately ignoring that fact just so you can be all sanctimonious about it. Another troll.

I'm ignoring that silly argument because somebody like Swartz who is intimately knowledgeable about computers, programming, and the internet would know that what he was doing is illegal and could land him in jail for quite a long time. I'm ignoring that silly argument because he was already on the feds' radar before for what he did to the PACER database. I'm ignoring that silly argument because his actions in the wake of his PACER investigation show his blatant disregard for the law, and his manifesto reinforces it.

Anybody who can do all of these things show that this wasn't the actions of an impulsive young person. These are the actions of a person who does not care for the rule of law, and no amount of wrist slapping was going to deter him otherwise.

Consequences, that's what people in the real world have to deal with. He's no different.

Actually, to an extent I agree with you. He certainly went about it the wrong way and deserved to be punished for it. My problem (and I suspect his) with it was the "felon" label being applied for the rest of his life. What he did was in much more (misguided) civil disobedience than criminal in nature, and THAT is the center of all the disagreement as far as I can tell. If he had been given a misdemeanor instead of a felony rap sheet, then I'd have absolutely no problem with that. Instead they wanted to lump him in with drug dealers, thieves, and murderers by applying that "felony" label. THAT is where they went waayyy overboard.

We've all been young and stupid -- some more than others, I'll grant you, but the fact remains most of us have done impulsive things we later regretted. I'm merely of the opinion that sentencing guidelines need to be re-written to take this fact of human nature into account.

None of the charges on the indictment are misdemeanor charges.

Additionally, when he constantly defeated the roadblocks MIT put up to discourage his activities (which he carried on for over three months) to the point of sneaking his computer into a network closet to bypass their WiFi security altogether, his actions have demonstrated themselves to be anything but impulsive. Impulsive would've been stopping the first time MIT booted him off their network.

*Somebody* must pay for the hosting of the public domain works. If Swartz was willing to foot the bill, then the question of JSTOR paying for their servers is unimportant as they are not needed. If Swartz could not foot the bill, then JSTOR would simply continue charging and people would continue to pay. If the works were released onto a torrent network, then the hosting could be distributed solving the hosting cost problem completely.

Your issue with authors getting paid is not at all related to this discussion because the research papers were/are already public domain and JSTOR was/is the only one making money.

That's totally untrue. I had already linked to JSTOR's tax return that showed they had funnel millions from their access charges back to the content providers. Some authors have better/worse arrangements with their publishers. If you authorized contents in JSTOR and you are not making money off it, it's between you and your publisher(s).

The tax return also showed that they spend millions annually scan/digitize contents that's not "born digital."

Most of the contents in JSTOR are not public domain at all. Nothing stopped Aaron Swartz from "crowd sourcing" volunteers to scan/digitize those contents from libraries/archives around the world. He was prevented from piggyback/cherrypick on other people's efforts.

Another deliberately obtuse one (wouldn't surprise me if one and the same). Amusingly your thinking is starting to look VERY much like Aaron's: True of False, Black or White with no grey in between.

Yes, he needs to be held accountable for what he did, but the punishment needs to take into account the impulsiveness of youth and not wreck the rest of his life due to it. I said that already, but you're deliberately ignoring that fact just so you can be all sanctimonious about it. Another troll.

I'm ignoring that silly argument because somebody like Swartz who is intimately knowledgeable about computers, programming, and the internet would know that what he was doing is illegal and could land him in jail for quite a long time. I'm ignoring that silly argument because he was already on the feds' radar before for what he did to the PACER database. I'm ignoring that silly argument because his actions in the wake of his PACER investigation show his blatant disregard for the law, and his manifesto reinforces it.

Anybody who can do all of these things show that this wasn't the actions of an impulsive young person. These are the actions of a person who does not care for the rule of law, and no amount of wrist slapping was going to deter him otherwise.

Consequences, that's what people in the real world have to deal with. He's no different.

Actually, to an extent I agree with you. He certainly went about it the wrong way and deserved to be punished for it. My problem (and I suspect his) with it was the "felon" label being applied for the rest of his life. What he did was in much more (misguided) civil disobedience than criminal in nature, and THAT is the center of all the disagreement as far as I can tell. If he had been given a misdemeanor instead of a felony rap sheet, then I'd have absolutely no problem with that. Instead they wanted to lump him in with drug dealers, thieves, and murderers by applying that "felony" label. THAT is where they went waayyy overboard.

We've all been young and stupid -- some more than others, I'll grant you, but the fact remains most of us have done impulsive things we later regretted. I'm merely of the opinion that sentencing guidelines need to be re-written to take this fact of human nature into account.

None of the charges on the indictment are misdemeanor charges.

Additionally, when he constantly defeated the roadblocks MIT put up to discourage his activities (which he carried on for over three months) to the point of sneaking his computer into a network closet to bypass their WiFi security altogether, his actions have demonstrated themselves to be anything but impulsive. Impulsive would've been stopping the first time MIT booted him off their network.

Yeah, after I posted I realized that was probably the wrong word to use. Sorry, you're right - it was not impulsive, but it certainly smacks of "young, idealistic, and stupid." Again, I'd have had no problem if he was just punished for what he did, allowed to learn from that mistake, and given a chance to go on and lead a productive life without the "felon" noose around his neck.

For those young adults who didn't get appropriate guidance and limit-setting from their parents while growing up, this could be a strong wake-up call without the need to brand them as untrustworthy for the rest of their lives. There needs to be a path to legitimacy that a misguided/angry/otherwise troubled, but basically decent person can follow to get back on the right path. One that's spelled out in the lawbooks and not subject to the whims of whoever's in the courtroom as in the Casey Anthony case you mentioned.

If such a clear path to legitimacy were laid before Aaron, maybe he wouldn't have felt so trapped.

Yeah, after I posted I realized that was probably the wrong word to use. Sorry, you're right - it was not impulsive, but it certainly smacks of "young, idealistic, and stupid." Again, I'd have had no problem if he was just punished for what he did, allowed to learn from that mistake, and given a chance to go on and lead a productive life without the "felon" noose around his neck.

Aaron Swartz had plenty of "wake-up call" in his life. He failed to heed them. He had gotten passes after passes from his previous crimes against libraries. His network of sycophant enablers cheered him on, so he keep doing questionable things. It's like skateboarders/any other adrenaline junkies that feel compelled to do increasingly dangerous stunts to top the previous one.

The problem with Aaron Swartz wasn't that he didn't get enough leniency but too many.

As for your contention that a felon conviction beeing a "noose" around his neck for life, I doubt it. If we look back his career, he really only worked as "employee" for one employer, Conde Nast. And Conde Nast has a reputation for hiring felons. There are plenty example of ex-cons getting VC founding in tech. The first people convicted under CFAA is now a tenured professor at MIT. Then there are ex-cons like Piper Kerman whose professional career seems solely based on being an ex-con. I figure Aaron Swartz would be the Piper Kerman type.

Yeah, after I posted I realized that was probably the wrong word to use. Sorry, you're right - it was not impulsive, but it certainly smacks of "young, idealistic, and stupid." Again, I'd have had no problem if he was just punished for what he did, allowed to learn from that mistake, and given a chance to go on and lead a productive life without the "felon" noose around his neck.

Aaron Swartz had plenty of "wake-up call" in his life. He failed to heed them. He had gotten passes after passes from his previous crimes against libraries. His network of sycophant enablers cheered him on, so he keep doing questionable things. It's like skateboarders/any other adrenaline junkies that feel compelled to do increasingly dangerous stunts to top the previous one.

I.E. "Young and stupid." I agree that far too often kids are given a free pass because... well, they're kids. What far too many adults don't seem to understand is that is exactly the best time to come down hard on them - they're still learning and testing their limits and it's better to set more realistic ones now. When they are older and think they know the limits they get confused and angry when reality smacks them in the face -- they think it's BS because they had MORE freedom when they were younger and were supposedly "less free" due to being under their parents control (I know I can say that better, but I'm tired due to minimal sleep last night).

Just because someone is physically an adult doesn't mean they have matured (some never do). It can take a LONG time to overcome being poorly raised (speaking from personal experience here - my family used to taunt me with "Casey Jones" from the Grateful Dead while I was growing up, somewhat expecting me to wind up in jail -- which I never did). Just because someone is physically an adult doesn't mean they have a clue how to be one.

As for your contention that a felon conviction beeing a "noose" around his neck for life, I doubt it. If we look back his career, he really only worked as "employee" for one employer, Conde Nast. And Conde Nast has a reputation for hiring felons. There are plenty example of ex-cons getting VC founding in tech. The first people convicted under CFAA is now a tenured professor at MIT. Then there are ex-cons like Piper Kerman whose professional career seems solely based on being an ex-con. I figure Aaron Swartz would be the Piper Kerman type.

I unfortunately haven't the time right now to read through your linked references (will try to do so later), and I have no idea who those people are. However you must remember each person is unique. Given the same set of circumstances, each will react differently. He was already strongly prone to depression and I imagine his well-to-do upbringing made the propect of being considered a felon akin to being a leper or some other sort of outcast.

I don't know - I haven't obsessed over this case like others have and I have little doubt I am projecting a lot of my own experiences onto him, but even without considering all that I feel very confident in saying our system of justice is highly flawed and in this case went too far in trying to secure the conviction. Do I believe the prosecution was trying to push him over the edge mentally? Of course not, but in their zeal to get a definite conviction they did not take the time to consider what effect their typical bullying tatics might have on him and that says to me there needs to be some tweaking to how these things are done. At the very least when a documented history of mental instability exists then they should have gotten a shrink involved.

I know you'll probably think the procescution's job is not to nursemaid the poor little criminals, but wouldn't addressing their problems make us ALL safer and more secure? Isn't that the point of law enforcement? Whatever you think, it's pretty damned obvious that the way things have been done so far just isn't working very well and so it's long past time to try new approaches.

The only crime I see here was trespass, and MIT and the State of Massachusetts declined to go to court and press this charge. JSTOR, the aggrieved party, took a look at the situation and basically gave him a pass.

Only the US Government wanted to press charges, on a flimsy notion the access to these Journals on an open network was criminal. His crime, in their view, was that Aaron was clever in how he exploited the network to download a copy of these articles, and what had been (previously) a civil issue could be elevated to a criminal one under the CFAA.

Now, it's easy to wave the "law and order" banner - after all, who is against the fair and unbiased exercise of prosecutors to prosecute the law and preserve the good order of society? But we should expect that the people wielding that power will do this when they can prove their case, and not use it to hound and harass a citizen into bankruptcy and (in this case) suicide.

The only crime I see here was trespass, and MIT and the State of Massachusetts declined to go to court and press this charge. JSTOR, the aggrieved party, took a look at the situation and basically gave him a pass.

Only the US Government wanted to press charges, on a flimsy notion the access to these Journals on an open network was criminal. His crime, in their view, was that Aaron was clever in how he exploited the network to download a copy of these articles, and what had been (previously) a civil issue could be elevated to a criminal one under the CFAA.

Now, it's easy to wave the "law and order" banner - after all, who is against the fair and unbiased exercise of prosecutors to prosecute the law and preserve the good order of society? But we should expect that the people wielding that power will do this when they can prove their case, and not use it to hound and harass a citizen into bankruptcy and (in this case) suicide.

I assume that the aggressive prosecution by the federal government, when neither JSTOR nor MIT were calling for punishment, was payback for the earlier PACER copying. The government couldn't find anything to charge him with over PACER, but they sure felt like it should have been a crime, so they were going to hit hard when he actually did violate a law.

Swartz's Guerilla Open Access Manifesto described practices that were already happening, rather than catalyzing mass downloading of journals. You can get huge collections of indexed, complete journal archives from torrents and file hosting sites. The same goes for almost any technical book published in the last 15 years, and most of the older ones that are still widely read. Most academic pirate collections originate from eastern Europe, Russia, China, India -- places that have a lot of educated techies with computers but substantially lower median incomes than the West. They are quite capable of amassing collections on their own, and the US government is never going to get a chance to prosecute them. Aaron's JSTOR downloading and the government reaction to it were both symbolic rather than substantive milestones along the road to the global pirate public library.

Although I agree that the prosecution in this case was, frankly, insane and ridiculous... at the same time, I disagree with Aaron's positions and the fact that he wouldn't even dare think about compromise.

I've written articles for publication, some of which I was paid for. I spend a considerable amount of money on my education, and training, for the sole purpose of writing and getting paid to be a researcher. If everything is free, how do I pay my bills?

How does JSTOR pay for their servers so I can get access to things when I'm writing a literature review? How do they pay their accountants? Secretaries?

I own a small publishing company as a hobby. Most of the money made goes to the authors and editors. I keep maybe 20% of what is earned. Yet people still pirate our books. We keep our ebook prices very low - we have prices that are 1.99, 2.99, and some at 5.99 (for VERY large books - and we've lowered those, or offered frequent discounts). Apparently our books should be "free" because hey - why should our authors get paid for their time?

The minute someone can explain to me, rationally, how I should pay my bills (or write me a check to pay off my student loans) I'll be happy to support Aaron's position. Until then, I agree the prosecuting attorney should be punished - but Aaron deserved punishment as well.

There is an entire book about the history of JSTOR up to around the mid 2000s (before Swartz). The irony is that they kind of had some of the same ideas as him. Provide information to the world that had previously been locked up in ivory towers.

They got huge, massive grants to begin with. They also receive income from the libraries at various institutions that buy 'subscriptions' to their service. They even had a sliding scale - libraries in poor countries could get cheaper access than libraries in major US universities.

In turn JSTOR spent an inordinate amount of time hashing out copyright agreements with various journal owners and publishers.

Then JSTOR went into university libraries and started shipping old journals to the Dominican Republic where they were scanned.

In other words, JSTOR gets income from libraries, but it also gets all of it's raw material from libraries. The vast majority of the journals it provides access to can also be accessed by anyone walking into a public university library and going to the periodicals section, for free. (Although I haven't been to a public library in a while... im not sure if they are still public, but back in the good old days, since they were taxpayer funded, any taxpayer had the right to walk in and start reading).

Your argument is that the currently existing business model for academic journals is the only business model, and that it is the correct business model. I think that argument has a lot of people who would disagree.

The funniest part to me is that Google Books did something similar to JSTOR--- except they skipped that whole "work out agreements with publishers". They just started scanning stuff without asking anyone, and let their lawyers sort out the details. There is very little difference, technically, between what Swartz did and what Google Books does. The difference is that since Google went directly to the original paper, they couldn't be charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - which is what got Swartz in so much trouble.

I never once said it was the only business model. I just asked how I'm supposed to pay my bills. Provide an answer, and I'm happy to join your crusade. See, if my student loan company comes knocking at my door I can't say "Information wants to be free!" They don't give a crap, and I like living in an apartment. Will you pay my rent? I like having internet access so I can research and write the articles you want to distribute for free - you going to pay my cable bill? I'm more then willing to accept any alternative model that lets my work be 100% free - but allows me to afford the food, shelter, and bills I have to pay in order to provide the content you want me to provide for free.

Let me know when you have a solution.

Get paid for your time not for by the copies sold. Its just like stopping software piracy. If developers made sure to get paid for their time to develop software, who cares that copies are being pirated.

Who's writing those paychecks? And where is the money supposed to come from? Who will pay for software (or anything else, for that matter) if they can get it for free?

I've never prated software or any other intellectual property, so the question I was asked earlier was the wrong question. The question isn't whether something is worth so little to me I'd steal it, the question is, given a choice between free and paying a price, all else being equal (in particular both options being legal) of course I'd choose free, wouldn't everybody?

I might be wrong, but isn't there a lot of running around the real issue here?The documents this is about is research and knowledge papers already paid for by tax money (and around the world, not just US). So it is documents alreday paid for by the public which is concealed behind a paywall for no other reason than greed. THAT is the real point.This would be the main issue even if he had not killed himself.All other discussion around this is just noise detracting from the real issue.So it would not have impacted negatively on anyone other than those companies that should not be allowed to do what they do anyway.If Jstor had only had documents that was produced by money generated by sales, then this had never happened. Or if the cost to get those documents was only for maintaining the service, as the law in US says.

And all that is still only viable discussion at all if Aaron actually intended to use the downloads to make the documents freely public.

Maybe so, but it wasn't Swartz's job to single-handedly "liberate" those research papers. If the research had been paid for with public money, that money came from some public agency. Swartz could have gone to each agency, making his case to "liberate" any research they funded.

I know that's hard. But the easy way was illegal. If Swartz was really an "adult" could he not see what he was doing was wrong? Apparently he had some inkling because he hid his face from security cams, ran from police, time and time again did whatever it took to get around JSTOR's security measures.

Despite the efforts of his defenders to justify his actions, I think Swartz knew exactly what he was doing. He just wasn't willing to own up to it and deal with the consequences. He felt he was above the law.

Although I agree that the prosecution in this case was, frankly, insane and ridiculous... at the same time, I disagree with Aaron's positions and the fact that he wouldn't even dare think about compromise.

I've written articles for publication, some of which I was paid for. I spend a considerable amount of money on my education, and training, for the sole purpose of writing and getting paid to be a researcher. If everything is free, how do I pay my bills?

How does JSTOR pay for their servers so I can get access to things when I'm writing a literature review? How do they pay their accountants? Secretaries?

I own a small publishing company as a hobby. Most of the money made goes to the authors and editors. I keep maybe 20% of what is earned. Yet people still pirate our books. We keep our ebook prices very low - we have prices that are 1.99, 2.99, and some at 5.99 (for VERY large books - and we've lowered those, or offered frequent discounts). Apparently our books should be "free" because hey - why should our authors get paid for their time?

The minute someone can explain to me, rationally, how I should pay my bills (or write me a check to pay off my student loans) I'll be happy to support Aaron's position. Until then, I agree the prosecuting attorney should be punished - but Aaron deserved punishment as well.

There is an entire book about the history of JSTOR up to around the mid 2000s (before Swartz). The irony is that they kind of had some of the same ideas as him. Provide information to the world that had previously been locked up in ivory towers.

They got huge, massive grants to begin with. They also receive income from the libraries at various institutions that buy 'subscriptions' to their service. They even had a sliding scale - libraries in poor countries could get cheaper access than libraries in major US universities.

In turn JSTOR spent an inordinate amount of time hashing out copyright agreements with various journal owners and publishers.

Then JSTOR went into university libraries and started shipping old journals to the Dominican Republic where they were scanned.

In other words, JSTOR gets income from libraries, but it also gets all of it's raw material from libraries. The vast majority of the journals it provides access to can also be accessed by anyone walking into a public university library and going to the periodicals section, for free. (Although I haven't been to a public library in a while... im not sure if they are still public, but back in the good old days, since they were taxpayer funded, any taxpayer had the right to walk in and start reading).

Your argument is that the currently existing business model for academic journals is the only business model, and that it is the correct business model. I think that argument has a lot of people who would disagree.

The funniest part to me is that Google Books did something similar to JSTOR--- except they skipped that whole "work out agreements with publishers". They just started scanning stuff without asking anyone, and let their lawyers sort out the details. There is very little difference, technically, between what Swartz did and what Google Books does. The difference is that since Google went directly to the original paper, they couldn't be charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - which is what got Swartz in so much trouble.

I never once said it was the only business model. I just asked how I'm supposed to pay my bills. Provide an answer, and I'm happy to join your crusade. See, if my student loan company comes knocking at my door I can't say "Information wants to be free!" They don't give a crap, and I like living in an apartment. Will you pay my rent? I like having internet access so I can research and write the articles you want to distribute for free - you going to pay my cable bill? I'm more then willing to accept any alternative model that lets my work be 100% free - but allows me to afford the food, shelter, and bills I have to pay in order to provide the content you want me to provide for free.

Let me know when you have a solution.

Get paid for your time not for by the copies sold. Its just like stopping software piracy. If developers made sure to get paid for their time to develop software, who cares that copies are being pirated.

Who's writing those paychecks? And where is the money supposed to come from? Who will pay for software (or anything else, for that matter) if they can get it for free?

I've never prated software or any other intellectual property, so the question I was asked earlier was the wrong question. The question isn't whether something is worth so little to me I'd steal it, the question is, given a choice between free and paying a price, all else being equal (in particular both options being legal) of course I'd choose free, wouldn't everybody?

That is the difference between a kickstarter vs the traditional way. Get the money up front, and the customer hopes for the best. Or the artists creates, and then hopes for the best.

The really sad thing, the overzealous prosecutor received no consequences for this and she was clearly the major reason for his suicide.

That is a really cold statement above.

It's ridiculous to blame anyone but Aaron for the death of Aaron, he took is own life because he was unwilling to face the consequences of his actions. Prosecutors always go for the maximum sentence , sometimes they get it, other times they don't. It didn't start with Aaron, and it wouldn't end with him. He wouldn't be the only person who had been given the rough side of the law. There are many more people languishing in jails ( some with life sentences) for crimes they didn't even commit and yet they didn't commit suicide. is he better than those people?

While people (wrongly, I think) blame the prosecutor for being overzealous, they never ask: would the prosecution ever have gotten involved had Aaron not done what he did? In other words (as others have said), Aaron brought this upon himself, and apparently he was not willing to be held accountable for his own actions, as if he were "above the law".

"The law" means shit. In my life, I can safely say that I have not harmed a single person in a criminal way (i.e. hurt them, stolen money from them, etc). Despite this, if I was retroactively charged with every single law I have broken in the course of my life, I would literally owe billions if not trillions of dollars and be facing a few thousand years in jail. If at any point in your life you owned a pirated music collection, did any drugs, drank while underage, touched a computer and violated some of the few thousand TOS's you have slammed the "I agree" button on, failed to report all internet purchases to the IRS, or any number of laws you have violated, you are in the same boat. I'll happily avoid being "held accountable" like the plague, and so will hypocrites like you.

The US has more prisoners in actual number AND per capita than any other nation in the world, except for maybe North Korea. Law and order nuts need to fuck off. We have over 1% of the population in jail, many of them are in private prisons being used as essentially as slave labor for for profit corporations. The state pissed away hundreds of thousands of dollars chasing down a kid that theoretically might have passed around scientific articles to a bunch of poor kids in India. It isn't like libraries and corporations were suddenly going to suddenly stop paying their JSTOR subscriptions because you can illegally download them on the Internet. Any American in the US can walk into any fucking research library get access to JSTOR.

The entire thing was a complete fucking farce because the state pissed away hundreds of thousands of dollars running down someone who was, even in the most paranoid and delusional fantasies of prosecutors, was not going to do a drop of material harm. The money the government pissed away chasing down a young idealist doing no harm could have gone to chasing real criminals doing actual material harm or simply social good. Hell, that money would have been better spent simply giving it back to taxpayers.

The Feds apparently have enough time to send the fucking secret service after young idealist doing no harm, but they can't seem to find them time go prosecute a single human being for fraud committed during the financial meltdown that literally killed Americans and ruined millions of lives worldwide. Law and order assholes need to fuck off and get their priorities straight. If the shits that wasted their time chasing Aaron had no larger criminals to pursue or than idealistic activist doing no material harm, they need to be defunded and kicked to the curb.

Although I agree that the prosecution in this case was, frankly, insane and ridiculous... at the same time, I disagree with Aaron's positions and the fact that he wouldn't even dare think about compromise.

I've written articles for publication, some of which I was paid for. I spend a considerable amount of money on my education, and training, for the sole purpose of writing and getting paid to be a researcher. If everything is free, how do I pay my bills?

How does JSTOR pay for their servers so I can get access to things when I'm writing a literature review? How do they pay their accountants? Secretaries?

I own a small publishing company as a hobby. Most of the money made goes to the authors and editors. I keep maybe 20% of what is earned. Yet people still pirate our books. We keep our ebook prices very low - we have prices that are 1.99, 2.99, and some at 5.99 (for VERY large books - and we've lowered those, or offered frequent discounts). Apparently our books should be "free" because hey - why should our authors get paid for their time?

The minute someone can explain to me, rationally, how I should pay my bills (or write me a check to pay off my student loans) I'll be happy to support Aaron's position. Until then, I agree the prosecuting attorney should be punished - but Aaron deserved punishment as well.

*Somebody* must pay for the hosting of the public domain works. If Swartz was willing to foot the bill, then the question of JSTOR paying for their servers is unimportant as they are not needed. If Swartz could not foot the bill, then JSTOR would simply continue charging and people would continue to pay. If the works were released onto a torrent network, then the hosting could be distributed solving the hosting cost problem completely.

Your issue with authors getting paid is not at all related to this discussion because the research papers were/are already public domain and JSTOR was/is the only one making money.

There's a difference between "publicly funded" and "public domain". Just because a research paper is publicly funded does not automatically make it public domain, unless that is one of the terms of the grant. I don't know whether these papers were all public domain or all publicly funded, I just wanted to make the point that the two terms are not equivalent.

Although I agree that the prosecution in this case was, frankly, insane and ridiculous... at the same time, I disagree with Aaron's positions and the fact that he wouldn't even dare think about compromise.

I've written articles for publication, some of which I was paid for. I spend a considerable amount of money on my education, and training, for the sole purpose of writing and getting paid to be a researcher. If everything is free, how do I pay my bills?

How does JSTOR pay for their servers so I can get access to things when I'm writing a literature review? How do they pay their accountants? Secretaries?

I own a small publishing company as a hobby. Most of the money made goes to the authors and editors. I keep maybe 20% of what is earned. Yet people still pirate our books. We keep our ebook prices very low - we have prices that are 1.99, 2.99, and some at 5.99 (for VERY large books - and we've lowered those, or offered frequent discounts). Apparently our books should be "free" because hey - why should our authors get paid for their time?

The minute someone can explain to me, rationally, how I should pay my bills (or write me a check to pay off my student loans) I'll be happy to support Aaron's position. Until then, I agree the prosecuting attorney should be punished - but Aaron deserved punishment as well.

There is an entire book about the history of JSTOR up to around the mid 2000s (before Swartz). The irony is that they kind of had some of the same ideas as him. Provide information to the world that had previously been locked up in ivory towers.

They got huge, massive grants to begin with. They also receive income from the libraries at various institutions that buy 'subscriptions' to their service. They even had a sliding scale - libraries in poor countries could get cheaper access than libraries in major US universities.

In turn JSTOR spent an inordinate amount of time hashing out copyright agreements with various journal owners and publishers.

Then JSTOR went into university libraries and started shipping old journals to the Dominican Republic where they were scanned.

In other words, JSTOR gets income from libraries, but it also gets all of it's raw material from libraries. The vast majority of the journals it provides access to can also be accessed by anyone walking into a public university library and going to the periodicals section, for free. (Although I haven't been to a public library in a while... im not sure if they are still public, but back in the good old days, since they were taxpayer funded, any taxpayer had the right to walk in and start reading).

Your argument is that the currently existing business model for academic journals is the only business model, and that it is the correct business model. I think that argument has a lot of people who would disagree.

The funniest part to me is that Google Books did something similar to JSTOR--- except they skipped that whole "work out agreements with publishers". They just started scanning stuff without asking anyone, and let their lawyers sort out the details. There is very little difference, technically, between what Swartz did and what Google Books does. The difference is that since Google went directly to the original paper, they couldn't be charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - which is what got Swartz in so much trouble.

I never once said it was the only business model. I just asked how I'm supposed to pay my bills. Provide an answer, and I'm happy to join your crusade. See, if my student loan company comes knocking at my door I can't say "Information wants to be free!" They don't give a crap, and I like living in an apartment. Will you pay my rent? I like having internet access so I can research and write the articles you want to distribute for free - you going to pay my cable bill? I'm more then willing to accept any alternative model that lets my work be 100% free - but allows me to afford the food, shelter, and bills I have to pay in order to provide the content you want me to provide for free.

Let me know when you have a solution.

Get paid for your time not for by the copies sold. Its just like stopping software piracy. If developers made sure to get paid for their time to develop software, who cares that copies are being pirated.

Who's writing those paychecks? And where is the money supposed to come from? Who will pay for software (or anything else, for that matter) if they can get it for free?

I've never prated software or any other intellectual property, so the question I was asked earlier was the wrong question. The question isn't whether something is worth so little to me I'd steal it, the question is, given a choice between free and paying a price, all else being equal (in particular both options being legal) of course I'd choose free, wouldn't everybody?

That is the difference between a kickstarter vs the traditional way. Get the money up front, and the customer hopes for the best. Or the artists creates, and then hopes for the best.

Fine, if that's the author's choice. But let the author make that choice. You can't make it for him. Pirates like Swartz are making that choice for the authors. They don't have that right.

That is the difference between a kickstarter vs the traditional way. Get the money up front, and the customer hopes for the best. Or the artists creates, and then hopes for the best.

Fine, if that's the author's choice. But let the author make that choice. You can't make it for him. Pirates like Swartz are making that choice for the authors. They don't have that right.

Of course. My point is that kickstarters actually move the issue of piracy were it should be. Right in the public's lap. When piracy is happening to artists, it's easy for the public to go, so what? When piracy is happening to the public, that's harder to ignore.

This is off topic, but I honestly believe the grant money paying for the research should have some amount allocated to paying for publication.

Where else do you think publication costs come from? It's not even as if the publication fees are anywhere near enough to pay for universal free access and still compensate the people involved appropriately. Ask somebody who does peer review how much they get paid sometime, but you might want to tie your jaw shut first.

Haha, what do you think my job is? Admittedly, I'm still a student, so my exposure to the funding side of things is a little low, but then, my pay is significantly lower than it would be otherwise as well!Admittedly, my field is computer science, so I am payed significantly better than the humanities side of things, who are payed dismal amounts for what they do. Tim Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge, has some interesting things to say on this matter, and is more informed than I am: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/ ... ity-press/Furthermore, I would point out we (the US) have legally mandated that work funded by the federal government be released to the public within a year of publishing. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us ... olicy.html

That is the difference between a kickstarter vs the traditional way. Get the money up front, and the customer hopes for the best. Or the artists creates, and then hopes for the best.

Fine, if that's the author's choice. But let the author make that choice. You can't make it for him. Pirates like Swartz are making that choice for the authors. They don't have that right.

Of course. My point is that kickstarters actually move the issue of piracy were it should be. Right in the public's lap. When piracy is happening to artists, it's easy for the public to go, so what? When piracy is happening to the public, that's harder to ignore.

Kind of like the financial crisis. One side like to blame the bankers for faulty models, and the banks like to blame the public for cheating on their mortgage applications.

This is off topic, but I honestly believe the grant money paying for the research should have some amount allocated to paying for publication.

Where else do you think publication costs come from? It's not even as if the publication fees are anywhere near enough to pay for universal free access and still compensate the people involved appropriately. Ask somebody who does peer review how much they get paid sometime, but you might want to tie your jaw shut first.

Haha, what do you think my job is? Admittedly, I'm still a student, so my exposure to the funding side of things is a little low, but then, my pay is significantly lower than it would be otherwise as well!Admittedly, my field is computer science, so I am payed significantly better than the humanities side of things, who are payed dismal amounts for what they do. Tim Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge, has some interesting things to say on this matter, and is more informed than I am: http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/07/02/ ... ity-press/Furthermore, I would point out we (the US) have legally mandated that work funded by the federal government be released to the public within a year of publishing. http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/02/us ... olicy.html

That's great news, but it applies only to projects after its release, and it was released in Feb 2013. It does not apply to most of JSTOR's papers, but it's a start.

Get paid for your time not for by the copies sold. Its just like stopping software piracy. If developers made sure to get paid for their time to develop software, who cares that copies are being pirated.

Who's writing those paychecks? And where is the money supposed to come from? Who will pay for software (or anything else, for that matter) if they can get it for free?

I've never prated software or any other intellectual property, so the question I was asked earlier was the wrong question. The question isn't whether something is worth so little to me I'd steal it, the question is, given a choice between free and paying a price, all else being equal (in particular both options being legal) of course I'd choose free, wouldn't everybody?

That is the difference between a kickstarter vs the traditional way. Get the money up front, and the customer hopes for the best. Or the artists creates, and then hopes for the best.

Fine, if that's the author's choice. But let the author make that choice. You can't make it for him. Pirates like Swartz are making that choice for the authors. They don't have that right.

I've been an author on journal papers in chemistry and computer science. No journal offered even a one time payment, certainly not royalties. In my time in graduate school I never heard of any author offered payment or ongoing royalties for journal articles. You published articles to disseminate your research and advance your career, not to make money. Peer reviewers didn't get paid either. The publishers got all the money.

What field(s) are you publishing in that pay for articles? I admit that I've only published in a couple of fields, but I have spent a lot of time hanging around academics from diverse fields and I never heard of one where authors typically got paid for journal articles.

If authors don't get payments for articles, and that's usually the case, journal piracy doesn't even deprive authors of hypothetical income the way e.g. popular fiction piracy does. By the same token, journal piracy does little damage to academic publishers because buyers are rarely individuals in the first place. Institutions buy the overwhelming majority of journal subscriptions, and unlike individuals, an academic library is never going to consider downloading a .rar from science-piratez.ru as an alternative to subscribing to Physical Review Letters.

I've been an author on journal papers in chemistry and computer science. No journal offered even a one time payment, certainly not royalties. In my time in graduate school I never heard of any author offered payment or ongoing royalties for journal articles. You published articles to disseminate your research and advance your career, not to make money. Peer reviewers didn't get paid either. The publishers got all the money.

What field(s) are you publishing in that pay for articles? I admit that I've only published in a couple of fields, but I have spent a lot of time hanging around academics from diverse fields and I never heard of one where authors typically got paid for journal articles.

If authors don't get payments for articles, and that's usually the case, journal piracy doesn't even deprive authors of hypothetical income the way e.g. popular fiction piracy does. By the same token, journal piracy does little damage to academic publishers because buyers are rarely individuals in the first place. Institutions buy the overwhelming majority of journal subscriptions, and unlike individuals, an academic library is never going to consider downloading a .rar from science-piratez.ru as an alternative to subscribing to Physical Review Letters.

You're not even mentioning that the journals don't pay for reviews (that's done by academics, and it's done for free to try to prevent bias) and for the most part don't do editing of the paper either. Essentially we give them a free source of income; all they have to do is host it. And then we've got Comcast Elsevier charging ridiculous prices for what little they actually do!http://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/ ... ome-facts/They're not even really trying to hide that that's how they operate:http://svpow.com/2013/12/20/elseviers-d ... y-clauses/

The whole system should have been dismantled the very day HTML and HTTP arrived on the scene. Force every grad student to learn semantic tagging and let the search engines take care of the rest. The fact papers appear in .PDF alone perpetuates the problem.

So which prosecutor was at fault when he tried to kill himself years before this incident?

Or, which family members are at fault for not forcing him to seek medical attention for his prolonged, and well know, bout with depression?

Did anyone of his friends and associates bother to suggest that someone who is suicidal, suffers from depression that a career of activism might not be such a wise choice.

Or would his friends and family prefer to continue the false claims of the number of years he was threatened with as being his only way out; when prosecution offered him a sentence that was quite lenient?

Keep feeding the delusions instead...

The prosecutor put excessive pressure on this man that directly lead to his suicide. Do I believe that he was totally a Boy Scout? No, but pressuring someone so much that they take their own life is bullying whether it is a student in a elementary-high school or college doing it or a prosecutor.This woman should have been fired for trying to use this man as a political whacking monkey.

Glenn Ford, Reginald Griffi, Damon Thibodeaux and Gussie Vann. You know what these people have in common ? They were all wrongly accused of a crime they never committed but were jailed for life, langusied in jail for several years only to be exonerated and freed in light of new "evidence"

Aaron Swartz on the hand committed a crime ( albeit a light one ) but was unwilling to accept punishment so ended his life. Are these the sort of people we want to celebrate as our "heroes", someone who is unwilling to take responsibility for his actions?

He was unwilling to accept punishment that was WIDELY over-punitive in regards to his offense. Did he kill someone? No. Did he physically injure someone? No. Did he damage property? Again, no.Therefore, in my opinion and that of a whole bunch of other sane people on this planet, he should have been looking at a fine at most and probation of at most 6 months.

Glenn Ford, Reginald Griffi, Damon Thibodeaux and Gussie Vann. You know what these people have in common ? They were all wrongly accused of a crime they never committed but were jailed for life, langusied in jail for several years only to be exonerated and freed in light of new "evidence"

Aaron Swartz on the hand committed a crime ( albeit a light one ) but was unwilling to accept punishment so ended his life. Are these the sort of people we want to celebrate as our "heroes", someone who is unwilling to take responsibility for his actions?

He was unwilling to accept punishment that was WIDELY over-punitive in regards to his offense. Did he kill someone? No. Did he physically injure someone? No. Did he damage property? Again, no.Therefore, in my opinion and that of a whole bunch of other sane people on this planet, he should have been looking at a fine at most and probation of at most 6 months.

Funny, those six months...those are the same six months he rejected in the plea agreement the prosecutors offered him. He had a way out, and he didn't take it because he thought he could get away with this because internet.

The whole system should have been dismantled the very day HTML and HTTP arrived on the scene. Force every grad student to learn semantic tagging and let the search engines take care of the rest. The fact papers appear in .PDF alone perpetuates the problem.

Hah, you sound like one of my professors in undergrad. I somewhat agree, but will point out that journals are currently the best system we have for determining whether a paper is worth reading. I mean, Arxiv is great, but there are enough papers claiming to prove P=NP or free energy on it that I'm hesitant to give up that benefit. The value provided is nowhere near the current price, though.

Although I agree that the prosecution in this case was, frankly, insane and ridiculous... at the same time, I disagree with Aaron's positions and the fact that he wouldn't even dare think about compromise.

I've written articles for publication, some of which I was paid for. I spend a considerable amount of money on my education, and training, for the sole purpose of writing and getting paid to be a researcher. If everything is free, how do I pay my bills?

How does JSTOR pay for their servers so I can get access to things when I'm writing a literature review? How do they pay their accountants? Secretaries?

I own a small publishing company as a hobby. Most of the money made goes to the authors and editors. I keep maybe 20% of what is earned. Yet people still pirate our books. We keep our ebook prices very low - we have prices that are 1.99, 2.99, and some at 5.99 (for VERY large books - and we've lowered those, or offered frequent discounts). Apparently our books should be "free" because hey - why should our authors get paid for their time?

The minute someone can explain to me, rationally, how I should pay my bills (or write me a check to pay off my student loans) I'll be happy to support Aaron's position. Until then, I agree the prosecuting attorney should be punished - but Aaron deserved punishment as well.

There is an entire book about the history of JSTOR up to around the mid 2000s (before Swartz). The irony is that they kind of had some of the same ideas as him. Provide information to the world that had previously been locked up in ivory towers.

They got huge, massive grants to begin with. They also receive income from the libraries at various institutions that buy 'subscriptions' to their service. They even had a sliding scale - libraries in poor countries could get cheaper access than libraries in major US universities.

In turn JSTOR spent an inordinate amount of time hashing out copyright agreements with various journal owners and publishers.

Then JSTOR went into university libraries and started shipping old journals to the Dominican Republic where they were scanned.

In other words, JSTOR gets income from libraries, but it also gets all of it's raw material from libraries. The vast majority of the journals it provides access to can also be accessed by anyone walking into a public university library and going to the periodicals section, for free. (Although I haven't been to a public library in a while... im not sure if they are still public, but back in the good old days, since they were taxpayer funded, any taxpayer had the right to walk in and start reading).

Your argument is that the currently existing business model for academic journals is the only business model, and that it is the correct business model. I think that argument has a lot of people who would disagree.

The funniest part to me is that Google Books did something similar to JSTOR--- except they skipped that whole "work out agreements with publishers". They just started scanning stuff without asking anyone, and let their lawyers sort out the details. There is very little difference, technically, between what Swartz did and what Google Books does. The difference is that since Google went directly to the original paper, they couldn't be charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - which is what got Swartz in so much trouble.

I never once said it was the only business model. I just asked how I'm supposed to pay my bills. Provide an answer, and I'm happy to join your crusade. See, if my student loan company comes knocking at my door I can't say "Information wants to be free!" They don't give a crap, and I like living in an apartment. Will you pay my rent? I like having internet access so I can research and write the articles you want to distribute for free - you going to pay my cable bill? I'm more then willing to accept any alternative model that lets my work be 100% free - but allows me to afford the food, shelter, and bills I have to pay in order to provide the content you want me to provide for free.

Let me know when you have a solution.

Get paid for your time not for by the copies sold. Its just like stopping software piracy. If developers made sure to get paid for their time to develop software, who cares that copies are being pirated.

Who's writing those paychecks? And where is the money supposed to come from? Who will pay for software (or anything else, for that matter) if they can get it for free?

I've never prated software or any other intellectual property, so the question I was asked earlier was the wrong question. The question isn't whether something is worth so little to me I'd steal it, the question is, given a choice between free and paying a price, all else being equal (in particular both options being legal) of course I'd choose free, wouldn't everybody?

Your question has been studied, and the answer to [who would pay for anything if they can pirate it?] is that pirates will. Statistically speaking, people who pirate media on a regular basis are the best customers for the media industry. Most pirate things that they either can't access any other way in their country, or that aren't made conveniently available.

The idea that pirates are just freeloaders is one that has been consistently debunked. Incidentally, your point of view is flawed, you say that given the choice between a free version of something and a non-free version, you would choose the one that is free. You also say that you have never pirated anything. What you overlooks is that you have a choice between free and non-free, and you still choose to pay for things. You are a perfect example of why piracy isn't killing media companies.

Although I agree that the prosecution in this case was, frankly, insane and ridiculous... at the same time, I disagree with Aaron's positions and the fact that he wouldn't even dare think about compromise.

I've written articles for publication, some of which I was paid for. I spend a considerable amount of money on my education, and training, for the sole purpose of writing and getting paid to be a researcher. If everything is free, how do I pay my bills?

How does JSTOR pay for their servers so I can get access to things when I'm writing a literature review? How do they pay their accountants? Secretaries?

I own a small publishing company as a hobby. Most of the money made goes to the authors and editors. I keep maybe 20% of what is earned. Yet people still pirate our books. We keep our ebook prices very low - we have prices that are 1.99, 2.99, and some at 5.99 (for VERY large books - and we've lowered those, or offered frequent discounts). Apparently our books should be "free" because hey - why should our authors get paid for their time?

The minute someone can explain to me, rationally, how I should pay my bills (or write me a check to pay off my student loans) I'll be happy to support Aaron's position. Until then, I agree the prosecuting attorney should be punished - but Aaron deserved punishment as well.

There is an entire book about the history of JSTOR up to around the mid 2000s (before Swartz). The irony is that they kind of had some of the same ideas as him. Provide information to the world that had previously been locked up in ivory towers.

They got huge, massive grants to begin with. They also receive income from the libraries at various institutions that buy 'subscriptions' to their service. They even had a sliding scale - libraries in poor countries could get cheaper access than libraries in major US universities.

In turn JSTOR spent an inordinate amount of time hashing out copyright agreements with various journal owners and publishers.

Then JSTOR went into university libraries and started shipping old journals to the Dominican Republic where they were scanned.

In other words, JSTOR gets income from libraries, but it also gets all of it's raw material from libraries. The vast majority of the journals it provides access to can also be accessed by anyone walking into a public university library and going to the periodicals section, for free. (Although I haven't been to a public library in a while... im not sure if they are still public, but back in the good old days, since they were taxpayer funded, any taxpayer had the right to walk in and start reading).

Your argument is that the currently existing business model for academic journals is the only business model, and that it is the correct business model. I think that argument has a lot of people who would disagree.

The funniest part to me is that Google Books did something similar to JSTOR--- except they skipped that whole "work out agreements with publishers". They just started scanning stuff without asking anyone, and let their lawyers sort out the details. There is very little difference, technically, between what Swartz did and what Google Books does. The difference is that since Google went directly to the original paper, they couldn't be charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - which is what got Swartz in so much trouble.

I never once said it was the only business model. I just asked how I'm supposed to pay my bills. Provide an answer, and I'm happy to join your crusade. See, if my student loan company comes knocking at my door I can't say "Information wants to be free!" They don't give a crap, and I like living in an apartment. Will you pay my rent? I like having internet access so I can research and write the articles you want to distribute for free - you going to pay my cable bill? I'm more then willing to accept any alternative model that lets my work be 100% free - but allows me to afford the food, shelter, and bills I have to pay in order to provide the content you want me to provide for free.

Let me know when you have a solution.

Get paid for your time not for by the copies sold. Its just like stopping software piracy. If developers made sure to get paid for their time to develop software, who cares that copies are being pirated.

Who's writing those paychecks? And where is the money supposed to come from? Who will pay for software (or anything else, for that matter) if they can get it for free?

I've never prated software or any other intellectual property, so the question I was asked earlier was the wrong question. The question isn't whether something is worth so little to me I'd steal it, the question is, given a choice between free and paying a price, all else being equal (in particular both options being legal) of course I'd choose free, wouldn't everybody?

Your question has been studied, and the answer to [who would pay for anything if they can pirate it?] is that pirates will.

Did anyone check to see if their fingers were crossed behind their backs at the time?

The prosecutor put excessive pressure on this man that directly lead to his suicide. Do I believe that he was totally a Boy Scout? No, but pressuring someone so much that they take their own life is bullying whether it is a student in a elementary-high school or college doing it or a prosecutor.This woman should have been fired for trying to use this man as a political whacking monkey.

The only person who is responsible for Aaron Swartz's death is Aaron Swartz.

Again, what you are proposing sounds like the hostage scene from Blazing Saddle.

I like all the swaggering get-tough, law and order types that come out of the woodwork every time Aaron Swartz is the topic. Not willing to give an inch or even attempt to entertain the slightest notion of decency, fairness and justice when it comes to this situation. As if anyone else has not broken a law or three in their lives.

No swagger here. I've broken the law and been punished for it. Sorry that I don't have much sympathy for the punishment that Swartz faced but he DID break the law and just because you agree with him doesn't make you right. Should the original charge have been lower, perhaps but to put all the blame on the prosecutor is pretty lame. Swartz had some responsibility for what he did wrong and his suicide was a way to avoid that responsibility.

The really sad thing, the overzealous prosecutor received no consequences for this and she was clearly the major reason for his suicide.

That is a really cold statement above.

It's ridiculous to blame anyone but Aaron for the death of Aaron, he took is own life because he was unwilling to face the consequences of his actions. Prosecutors always go for the maximum sentence , sometimes they get it, other times they don't. It didn't start with Aaron, and it wouldn't end with him. He wouldn't be the only person who had been given the rough side of the law. There are many more people languishing in jails ( some with life sentences) for crimes they didn't even commit and yet they didn't commit suicide. is he better than those people?

While people (wrongly, I think) blame the prosecutor for being overzealous, they never ask: would the prosecution ever have gotten involved had Aaron not done what he did? In other words (as others have said), Aaron brought this upon himself, and apparently he was not willing to be held accountable for his own actions, as if he were "above the law".

"The law" means shit. In my life, I can safely say that I have not harmed a single person in a criminal way (i.e. hurt them, stolen money from them, etc). Despite this, if I was retroactively charged with every single law I have broken in the course of my life, I would literally owe billions if not trillions of dollars and be facing a few thousand years in jail. If at any point in your life you owned a pirated music collection, did any drugs, drank while underage, touched a computer and violated some of the few thousand TOS's you have slammed the "I agree" button on, failed to report all internet purchases to the IRS, or any number of laws you have violated, you are in the same boat. I'll happily avoid being "held accountable" like the plague, and so will hypocrites like you.

The US has more prisoners in actual number AND per capita than any other nation in the world, except for maybe North Korea. Law and order nuts need to fuck off. We have over 1% of the population in jail, many of them are in private prisons being used as essentially as slave labor for for profit corporations. The state pissed away hundreds of thousands of dollars chasing down a kid that theoretically might have passed around scientific articles to a bunch of poor kids in India. It isn't like libraries and corporations were suddenly going to suddenly stop paying their JSTOR subscriptions because you can illegally download them on the Internet. Any American in the US can walk into any fucking research library get access to JSTOR.

The entire thing was a complete fucking farce because the state pissed away hundreds of thousands of dollars running down someone who was, even in the most paranoid and delusional fantasies of prosecutors, was not going to do a drop of material harm. The money the government pissed away chasing down a young idealist doing no harm could have gone to chasing real criminals doing actual material harm or simply social good. Hell, that money would have been better spent simply giving it back to taxpayers.

The Feds apparently have enough time to send the fucking secret service after young idealist doing no harm, but they can't seem to find them time go prosecute a single human being for fraud committed during the financial meltdown that literally killed Americans and ruined millions of lives worldwide. Law and order assholes need to fuck off and get their priorities straight. If the shits that wasted their time chasing Aaron had no larger criminals to pursue or than idealistic activist doing no material harm, they need to be defunded and kicked to the curb.

Although I agree that the prosecution in this case was, frankly, insane and ridiculous... at the same time, I disagree with Aaron's positions and the fact that he wouldn't even dare think about compromise.

I've written articles for publication, some of which I was paid for. I spend a considerable amount of money on my education, and training, for the sole purpose of writing and getting paid to be a researcher. If everything is free, how do I pay my bills?

How does JSTOR pay for their servers so I can get access to things when I'm writing a literature review? How do they pay their accountants? Secretaries?

I own a small publishing company as a hobby. Most of the money made goes to the authors and editors. I keep maybe 20% of what is earned. Yet people still pirate our books. We keep our ebook prices very low - we have prices that are 1.99, 2.99, and some at 5.99 (for VERY large books - and we've lowered those, or offered frequent discounts). Apparently our books should be "free" because hey - why should our authors get paid for their time?

The minute someone can explain to me, rationally, how I should pay my bills (or write me a check to pay off my student loans) I'll be happy to support Aaron's position. Until then, I agree the prosecuting attorney should be punished - but Aaron deserved punishment as well.

There is an entire book about the history of JSTOR up to around the mid 2000s (before Swartz). The irony is that they kind of had some of the same ideas as him. Provide information to the world that had previously been locked up in ivory towers.

They got huge, massive grants to begin with. They also receive income from the libraries at various institutions that buy 'subscriptions' to their service. They even had a sliding scale - libraries in poor countries could get cheaper access than libraries in major US universities.

In turn JSTOR spent an inordinate amount of time hashing out copyright agreements with various journal owners and publishers.

Then JSTOR went into university libraries and started shipping old journals to the Dominican Republic where they were scanned.

In other words, JSTOR gets income from libraries, but it also gets all of it's raw material from libraries. The vast majority of the journals it provides access to can also be accessed by anyone walking into a public university library and going to the periodicals section, for free. (Although I haven't been to a public library in a while... im not sure if they are still public, but back in the good old days, since they were taxpayer funded, any taxpayer had the right to walk in and start reading).

Your argument is that the currently existing business model for academic journals is the only business model, and that it is the correct business model. I think that argument has a lot of people who would disagree.

The funniest part to me is that Google Books did something similar to JSTOR--- except they skipped that whole "work out agreements with publishers". They just started scanning stuff without asking anyone, and let their lawyers sort out the details. There is very little difference, technically, between what Swartz did and what Google Books does. The difference is that since Google went directly to the original paper, they couldn't be charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - which is what got Swartz in so much trouble.

I never once said it was the only business model. I just asked how I'm supposed to pay my bills. Provide an answer, and I'm happy to join your crusade. See, if my student loan company comes knocking at my door I can't say "Information wants to be free!" They don't give a crap, and I like living in an apartment. Will you pay my rent? I like having internet access so I can research and write the articles you want to distribute for free - you going to pay my cable bill? I'm more then willing to accept any alternative model that lets my work be 100% free - but allows me to afford the food, shelter, and bills I have to pay in order to provide the content you want me to provide for free.

Let me know when you have a solution.

Get paid for your time not for by the copies sold. Its just like stopping software piracy. If developers made sure to get paid for their time to develop software, who cares that copies are being pirated.

Who's writing those paychecks? And where is the money supposed to come from? Who will pay for software (or anything else, for that matter) if they can get it for free?

I've never prated software or any other intellectual property, so the question I was asked earlier was the wrong question. The question isn't whether something is worth so little to me I'd steal it, the question is, given a choice between free and paying a price, all else being equal (in particular both options being legal) of course I'd choose free, wouldn't everybody?

I can think of one way it can work. Hear me out. Say that a useful software ecosystem requires components A, B, C, D, etc. Someone who pays for one component but has free access to all the others is arguably getting an amazing rate of return on their investment even as they give it away. The only flaw I see is nobody is going to get rich selling shrink wrap software; yet developers who are actually doing the work get paid what the free market will bear.

Of course, this is only for components that make up a software ecosystem. The real money for developers is for work that is only suited for whomever is going to pay them for it (custom business applications and the like). The payer will not be worried about piracy in this case because the software won't be suited for anybody else.

I don't see why something similar can't work in similar fields of effort.

Your question has been studied, and the answer to [who would pay for anything if they can pirate it?] is that pirates will. Statistically speaking, people who pirate media on a regular basis are the best customers for the media industry. Most pirate things that they either can't access any other way in their country, or that aren't made conveniently available.

The idea that pirates are just freeloaders is one that has been consistently debunked. Incidentally, your point of view is flawed, you say that given the choice between a free version of something and a non-free version, you would choose the one that is free. You also say that you have never pirated anything. What you overlooks is that you have a choice between free and non-free, and you still choose to pay for things. You are a perfect example of why piracy isn't killing media companies.

I don't believe his point was about piracy so much as the consequences of legalized open information access; Swartz saw what he was doing a lot like the 1960s civil rights protests, that civil disobedience would change laws in his favor, but critics argue that this model doesn't work because people are cheapskates if legality isn't a factor. I submit as evidence the horribly underfunded state of all major FOSS projects, to the point where critical security holes are going unnoticed for years because the multibillion dollar empires built using that software approach it as getting a free lunch and who cares about the consequences. And this is what we're getting from idealistic technolibertarians, it gets far worse when it reaches mainstream consumers with a documented record of agreeing to all sorts of scammy bullshit in exchange for a free* trinket, let alone voluntarily paying for it.

Pirates aren't mainstream consumers though, not even close; they're usually driven more by ideology or desperation than convenience, especially now that the content industry has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century via streaming and digital distribution. Apples and oranges.

Glenn Ford, Reginald Griffi, Damon Thibodeaux and Gussie Vann. You know what these people have in common ? They were all wrongly accused of a crime they never committed but were jailed for life, langusied in jail for several years only to be exonerated and freed in light of new "evidence"

Aaron Swartz on the hand committed a crime ( albeit a light one ) but was unwilling to accept punishment so ended his life. Are these the sort of people we want to celebrate as our "heroes", someone who is unwilling to take responsibility for his actions?

He was unwilling to accept punishment that was WIDELY over-punitive in regards to his offense. Did he kill someone? No. Did he physically injure someone? No. Did he damage property? Again, no.Therefore, in my opinion and that of a whole bunch of other sane people on this planet, he should have been looking at a fine at most and probation of at most 6 months.

Funny, those six months...those are the same six months he rejected in the plea agreement the prosecutors offered him. He had a way out, and he didn't take it because he thought he could get away with this because internet.

Last I heard, they were looking at six months IN PRISON... not on probation.

Glenn Ford, Reginald Griffi, Damon Thibodeaux and Gussie Vann. You know what these people have in common ? They were all wrongly accused of a crime they never committed but were jailed for life, langusied in jail for several years only to be exonerated and freed in light of new "evidence"

Aaron Swartz on the hand committed a crime ( albeit a light one ) but was unwilling to accept punishment so ended his life. Are these the sort of people we want to celebrate as our "heroes", someone who is unwilling to take responsibility for his actions?

He was unwilling to accept punishment that was WIDELY over-punitive in regards to his offense. Did he kill someone? No. Did he physically injure someone? No. Did he damage property? Again, no.Therefore, in my opinion and that of a whole bunch of other sane people on this planet, he should have been looking at a fine at most and probation of at most 6 months.

Funny, those six months...those are the same six months he rejected in the plea agreement the prosecutors offered him. He had a way out, and he didn't take it because he thought he could get away with this because internet.

Last I heard, they were looking at six months IN PRISON... not on probation.

Don't do the crime if you can't do the crime. 6 months in prison for repeatedly causing problems on a network and with an online service; for secreting a computer onto the network to steal data. Somehow it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable.